Thesis

Related people/organizations

Date

May 21 2019

Description

Why Would You Want To Picture It uses high-dimensional spaces within machine intelligence as impetus for creative writing. The project philosophically engages with the opacity of neural networks and their ability to model the world — to render it computable.
A sculpture of a neural network diagram, taken from a research paper and rendered ten feet long in painted steel floats in the gallery. It is oscillating ever so slightly, making it hard to discern whether it is spatial at all. The room is filled by a synthetic voice recounting the experience of being a vector inside a neural network, the composition of the landscapes, its rules and poetry. The piece creates an experience of the disconnect between what can be observed, reasoned with, communicated, and that which emerges from within neural networks invisibly and un-imaginably: their “intelligence”. It asks to what extent the world can be modeled through mathematics, and conversely, whether we can understand these models — whether we can understand what we cannot observe or imagine?